A faster way to signup and start deploying applications

I’m thrilled to announce the new sign-up onboarding flow to speed up customer deployments. In this age of apps where the cloud breaks the barriers to instant connectivity, ElasticBox is trying to topple the roadblocks between applications and automatic deployments.

A self-service deployment requires many touch-points to guide the user from start to finish. Something like a change in the look and feel of the screens can spike user interest, but only in the short term. The real goal is time-to-value or TtV. That metric helps us measure one really valuable thing: How soon can DevOps start deploying given that they know little or nothing of ElasticBox? We spent weeks solving this challenge and removing one of the biggest roadblocks to deployments — the cloud.

For any deployment to succeed, speed is a factor. More critical than that is cloud virtual infrastructure without which you can’t really test-drive a deployment.

It’s a real challenge to integrate with cloud service APIs within the first few seconds of a user trying to sign up. Imagine provisioning cloud service connectivity and handling identity integration under the hood within that short time span. That’s exactly what we did. Throughout this process, our approach was to focus the onboarding on a fast, frictionless path to deployments.

Want to see what we came up with after weeks of effort? Here’s a sample look at the flow. It walks through the typical journey of a DevOps customer signing up and quickly deploying sample applications from a self-service catalog. The onboarding flow covers three phases.

Create an account

This is where you enter basic account information like name, email, and password.

Connect to a cloud service

Next, connect your deployment to one of the most used cloud services, like AWS, Google Cloud (GCE), or Azure. Optionally, if you don’t have cloud access, contact technical support to set you up.

Time to auto-deploy

Finally, when you’re done, you can start to deploy applications from the free self-service catalog. This quick video shows how.

What do you think? Does the new onboarding flow help you knock out the cloud barrier? We would love your feedback. Give it a spin and let us know.